There isn’t room to swing a cat in Studio 3 Seamus
I think we all know where we stand re Una and Sharon, so let’s just move on, other than to say that your opinions re Una channel2tv are clearly ageist in nature. How anybody can be ‘too old’ to present news is beyond me – in fact it is for this very reason that Anne Doyle has survived for as long as she has. Now at 54 years of age, she’s a good few years older than Una and yet is arguably the most famous (for all her faults) and most popular newscaster in Ireland. To say a bulletin or station needs a younger image is one thing, but observing that a person is too old to present news is an entirely different matter.
Interestingly however, this issue does tie into the revamp plans to a certain degree, and the future presentation of RTÉ News. To be quite honest I cannot see Anne Doyle adapting well to any major ‘structural’ changes in how news is presented. For example I can see her refusing to stand during bulletins (a good thing IMO
), being awkward in a more interactive environment, her steely persona clashing with the more conversational style that such changes tend to necessitate, and the myriad new cues for her to feck up. Coupled Nine’s alternating presentation with Eileen Dunne, it is something of a more ‘mature’ bulletin shall we say , making it very difficult to enforce major changes here. A good thing in my opinion – if there’s one serious, reflective, traditional-style bulletin, it ought to be Nine.
Overall though personally I cannot see RTÉ going with an ITV newswall like situation – not the whole studio that is, but the rolling-pictures scenario behind newscasters. I can see them sticking with picture windows/inserts and generally a more conservative pres package, with more cutting edge modernity (cough) being restricted to the set design. Although, with 16:9, anything is possible. The fact that no major British broadcaster uses inserts in 16:9 will doubtless influence RTÉ, unfortunately.
The one prospect that really excites me is the notion of a sultry look for the Nine bulletin – this revamp must be taken advantage of in this respect. The current look is so horribly harsh in the evenings especially – it’d be wonderful to have a moody dark look, even potentially using a lights-up/down scenario, though again I doubt RTÉ will avail of this. They cannot handle even the most basic operations at the minute, so I fail to see how they’d want to complicate matters further
A railcam would be wonderful alright – greater camera movement must be made in wides. Even at present the studio’s robot camera is only used for the opening of Six One and just the odd time for Nine, in spite of costing a fortune to operate and maintain – not even the BBC has a single robot camera in use in Television Centre they’re so costly to use! At present there are four cameras in Studio 3 – a typical amount in any conventional news setup. 3 are remotes, i.e. can only be operated via pan tilt and zoom, while the fourth is a remote and robot which can move across the floor via a mechanised base with wheels. I’ve been told that the BBC don’t use them anymore because they cost so much to maintain, but also as their insurers will not insure studio operations with them unless there’s a floor manager present at all times! This could well explain why it is rarely used on Nine, where there is no FM, but they still do sneakily use it!
I suspect at a guess that all of this remote equipment was installed for the 1997 revamp. As for the gallery, it’s possible it’s 16:9 ready, but the monitors and certain other equipment will have to be renewed. In any event the whole gallery may need updating and they might take this opportunity to do this – it is afterall still seemingly on an antiquated
VT-based system, though other elements are of course digital for quite a while.
Agreed that other looks were so much better than the muck we have now - the often forgotton about 1997 look is probably my favourite, though there are parts of 200 that are great too. 1997 just looked so sultry and professional. Also associate it with Anne Doyle being in her prime - she's gone down so much since
She never even uses her repertoire of bizarre closing lines anymore, like this at 26.03:
http://www.rte.ie/news/1999/0616/9news/9news.smil
And look at how professional the set looks! - that walnut wall with uplighters is a design classic!
.